This is a scene from a Game of Thrones watching party at a small pub–one of many which take place weekly around the world.
Including on Easter Sunday.
That’s not a picture of people passively enjoying entertainment. What’s captured in this still is an act of worship.
Look at the woman on the right with her hands clasped as if in prayer. The other bar patrons stare transfixed at the screen in a rapt state of communal piety.
Here’s the source video:
GoT fans aren’t the only ones working themselves into ecstasies over shallow mass media artifice.
Every natural human drive has a proper object. If these drives are denied healthy outlets, they don’t disappear. They become warped and perverted toward unhealthy ends.
Just as childless women of a certain age go crazy and start adopting cats, a civilization cut off from the true end of its religious impulses will invest its frustrated piety in man-made substitutes. But instead of the golden calf, we have Star Wars, cape movies, and nihilist Tolkien.
To restore the West, we must restore the liturgy.
To restore the West, we must re-embrace its proper name: Christendom.
And then follow that to the logical conclusions.
Deus vult.
Brian,
You echo Fr Z Who's cri de colour: save the liturgy save the world
xavier
Fr. Z is right.
"Reason and science" turn out to be empty gods indeed. Much as I like certain media franchises, I'd never mistake them for gods or for objects worthy of worship. Beautiful things are good, but they are not God.
No matter what the atheist says, you cannot take the desire for worship, religion, and the transcendent out of the human by taking away God. We will find something else to worship because that's what makes us human.
I've heard it said around these parts before, but it's true and bears repeating. The worst thing to happen for geeks and nerds is that their culture went mainstream.
The worst thing to happen for geeks and nerds is that their culture went mainstream.
They hungered for mainstream acceptance. I remember reading articles about how awful it was that the culture at large didn't treat video games as art. Also, in the 90s and 2000s, the video game scene was proud of its freewheeling nature.
Now it is broken and ashamed, always submitting to the whims of the SJWs.
Western video games went from Daggerfall, Turrican, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, DOOM, and Monkey Island, to being your typical drab Hollywood blockbuster with the imagination of a chickpea and less gameplay than ever before.
This is why the middle market is coming up while AAA is dying.
The soyfaces in the thumbnail say everything. All over a TV show. Not to mention it's a piece of entertainment that celebrates the worst in human beings and can never have a satisfying ending because every turn is based on subversion and nothing else. Bottom of the barrel trash.
It's going to be a rough for these people when it hits the fan.
They aren't called human sheep for nil.
It's interesting to see that in current productions of Little Shop of Horrors, the nerdy poindexter Rick Moranis version of Seymour is getting swapped out for goony beardmen of soy.
"Worst cases of estrogen poisoning I've ever seen."
Not really a quote, but close.
And all for some of the most trite, inane, amoral tripe on TV.
Harry Potter, GRRM, Star Wars/Trek, Big 5/6 Entertainment Companies: "You all have to go back."
They should lay off the sunscreen and plastics.
These folks need a bit of perspective. You can enjoy pop culture without letting it take over your life. I thought the Soul Cycle saga was really a cool set of books, but I'm not ready to form a religion around it. Starfleet doesn't exist and The Force(tm) isn't real, and I'm sure as heck not taking philosophical advice from G R R Martin.
Thank you for reading.
Chris,
Good point. It'slid the same Xseed. Great fun but I'm not writing a risk assessment or creating a political party from mechasomeone fighting each other
I won't lobby for a superhero registry after reading Hero falls
xavier
I'd have guessed NCAA finals.
It's a tv show, and not even a particularly good one. I've never watched a single episode, but from the sounds of it, it's sprinkles of decent story and character in hours and hours of crap, unimaginative plots and bad characterization. This theory is based off of recent Netflix garbage I've waded into.
These people need God.
Sportsball is another tentacle of the beast.
We find ourselves in a challenging position. We're redpilled on the weaponization of film, TV, vidya, oldpub, sportsball, etc. Yet most people, even those who are sympathetic to our viewpoint, are deeply dependent on one or more of these mass opiates.
Attack their media drug of choice head-on, and they lash out like all addicts do.
Of all the subjects I cover here, telling the truth about demonic activity generates the biggest backlash. Posts revealing that the pop culture emperors have no clothes come second. Otherwise sane and rational friends who fought with us in Sad/Rabid Puppies and #GG took to shunning me like Puritans giving a reprobate the cold shoulder when I exposed Star Wars, Marvel, etc. as Clown World agitprop.
We must walk a thin line, dipping one foot in the fetid waters of converged pop culture so we know enough to engage the normies, while maintaining our balance and sanity.
Years ago I got badgered into watching the first season of game of thrones. It was horrible. The defining scene to me is when the old advisor to the king was giving out plot points and there was a naked chick getting dressed next to him. I could just see a producer on set that day saying "people don't want to hear background info on the world! Throw some tits into this scene!"
Anyway, have any of you here read this article on bounding into comics about the defeat of the "big bad" of got, the night king?
https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/04/29/game-of-thrones-the-battle-of-winterfell-is-star-wars-the-last-jedi-bad/
It's laughably bad. The author is bitching about characters acting like heroes and winning against terrible odds (despite making bad decisions). It really is the bug people pulling their mask off and going "heroes? happy endings? those aren't what people should have!"
I think that's why Tolkien is still unmatched even today. Game of thrones is just murder porn, with actual porn in it.
The fine folks in the #PulpRev and Superversive literary movement are doing yeomen's work, and I count them as friends. In my opinion, they do labor under a rather naive assumption, though: the idea that current pop culture offerings are so bad that audiences will embrace works of true heroism and romance if only they're exposed to it.
As articles like the above piece show, such an assumption attributes agency to the NPCs and bugmen which they simply lack. Vast swaths of the populace have been so conditioned to revile truth, goodness, and beauty as to be rendered little Gollums who recoil from any whiff of elfland.
What, then, do you propose folks like the superversives do?
Keep doing what you're doing, but stay realistic about the ultimate scope of your short to mid-term impact.
This is a marathon, not a sprint. No sense setting ourselves up for discouragement.
Write for the Remnant, not the masses. It's important to provide an alternative for those who recognize the rot and turn away from it. Just don't expect the cattle to leave the herd to seek you out.
And be patient with them. Marvel managed to limp over the finish line with this round of films despite stumbling near the end. Increasing numbers are drifting away from Star Wars, and a lot of people see the writing on the Marvel wall. When the second cycle of films goes full woke, there will be another wave of fans looking for something new.
Be there for the few daring enough to join our merry band of poz-iconoclasts.
Well said.
I stopped watching GoT after season 7, which was just after my conversion, but I have heard what happened in S8 and the storytelling sounded like TLJ quality garbage. From what I heard it wasn't heroism that defeated the Night King but feminism. It was Arya Stark's BS ninja skillz outta nowhere that killed him when even dragonfire couldn't do it.
Praise God for the grace of conversion.
I must say, I agree with what Mr. Niemeier says here, but bad video example to prove the point.
They're at a bar drinking, amping up any emotional reaction, moreso by watching in a group of like minds. I'd look just the same at a public, alcohol-fueled screening of "Braveheart", and have no shame.
Most people are NPCs.
Not sure what that means. Are you insinuating I'm an NPC?
I think you're too contemptuous of these people, and too cynical. Again, I agree with almost all of what you say, but I don't see much compassion for these poor, blind, misguided, brainwashed, hope-deprived, godless sinners.
And that's not virtue-signaling; I think you know calling them NPCs lacks charity.
We all need to work on humility.
There is a distinct difference in WHAT they are watching. Applauding pointless nihilism is not the same as applauding physical feats in sports.
SFW religion does not offer anything better. Secular societies have higher standards of living, lower crime and violence rates than religous ones.
Secular societies are dying of self-inflicted wounds.
Meanwhile, atheism is the fastest-shrinking religious affiliation.
Give it up, fedora-tipper. You're done here.
Warrior1461,
The shortest day of the year is December 21st, but the coldest and snowiest days of winter don't usually come until late January or into February.
It's called latency.
Humanists really like avoiding the high suicide rates in secular societies.
Those aren't going away.
Nor is their penchant for importing predominantly Muslim and Catholic immigrants who far outbreed them.